


Role Of A Lifetime

by orphan_account



Category: Cabin Pressure
Genre: Gen, Gender Issues, Gender Related
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-13
Updated: 2012-04-13
Packaged: 2017-11-03 13:38:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/381907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Arthur is not as cut and dry as everyone thinks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Role Of A Lifetime

**Author's Note:**

> I've wanted to write genderfluid Arthur for a while now, I just...wanted ti to bhan this. All that means is that I me back to this general verse and write sometI suppose.

People think Arthur is simple, they think that he's an open book, that people know him inside and out just by looking at him.

But they don't, they never have.

And he doesn't mind playing dumb, playing simple. He do9ens't mind letting people make fun of him or call him an idiot. It's fine. It's better than anything else he could be called, it's better than what could happen.

Because as simple as Arthur may seem, he still has a survival instinct and he knows, knows from experience, that if he was to be honest, to let people in, he wouldn't survive. He wouldn't be able to walk away on two legs.

Because people don't like people like him, don't like people who can't decide who they are. They like their boys to be boys and girls to be girls and when that starts blending, when someone wants to be a boy one day and a girl the next and something in the middle the day after that? People get uneasy.

People get angry.

His father got angry. his father got fierce and angry and had fire in his eyes. He remembers that, remembers the fire more than anything, more than fists, more than pain, more than the blood. More than cursing and blame and hatred.

He remembers the fire.

And he remembers his mother, confused and scared but not willing to put up with it, not willing to stand for seeing her son, her daughter, her _child_ hurt. He remembers the fire in her eyes too, the way she grabbed him as they left, the way she tended to his wounds, the way she told him it was going to be all right.

He remembers all of it.

It's ingrained in his mind, the fear, the pain, the fire. It's stuck in his head and when he feels something different, which he usually does, he's never just purely a boy, it's there, waiting in the back of his mind. He put his family through hell, broke them apart and set them ablaze. He doesn't want to do that with his new family, with Douglas and Martin, with his mother and Herc.

SO he stays quiet, he pretends to be strictly 'him'. He learns how to not lie but act. It's just putting on a show and he can do that, he can pretend.

So Arthur smiles and Arthur laughs and Arthur is himself in every way he possibly can except for the part where he can never be more than _him_ self.


End file.
